ERA21 Contracted to Assist with Atlantic Area MAREN Project

ERA21 Ltd in collaboration with Cory Consultancy has won a contract to assit with the finance management of an Atlantic Area Interreg IVB project - call MAREN. Marine Renewable Energy - Energy Extraction and Hydro-environmental Aspects'.  This contract is with the University of Wales Cardiff. 

This project aims to provide high quality research results to support this innovative marine renewable energy industry, at a stage before major development decisions are taken.   The environmental assessment methodologies developed will be applied to sites that have realistic potential for the exploitation of marine renewable energy, with partners in each country selecting a single demonstrator site. Case studies will be undertaken by each partner at these sites and results and techniques used in these studies disseminated to all partners.  These comparisons and the access to new technologies will assist wider scale applications by reducing the time from research to use by government and industry. This work will also result in the development of a common methodology for Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) in all types of renewable energy fields and situations, which will be the first time that this has been achieved among countries of the Atlantic Area.  This project will also include an assessment of the CO2 reduction potential for the investigated case studies, which cover the most relevant marine renewable energy devices. The project will also investigate the impact of climate change on these CO2 reduction figures, including CO2 release resulting from increased storminess and flooding. A series of climate change scenarios will also be simulated and design requirements for marine renewable energy devices developed for predicted altered hydrodynamic conditions present in coastal waters as a result of the impacts of climate change